Power is violence, its promise, its deed. Power cares nothing for reason, nothing for justice, nothing for compassion. It is, in fact, the singular abnegation of these things - once the cloak of deceits is stripped away, this one truth is revealed.

A celebration of insignificance, Is that all we are in the end? And one day I’ll just be one more of those faces, frozen in death and wonder

For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.

I was needed, but I myself did not need. I had followers, but not allies, and only now do I understand the difference. And it is vast.

Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.

Such is the vastness of his genius that he can outwit even himself.

I have to feel what I'm writing, right down to the core.